1. Hello, thank you for your time, please introduce yourself in a few words!
Hi! Thanks for having us, we’re District Five from Zurich, Switzerland, injecting some weird Free-Space-Rock directly into your brain through your ear canals. We’re often mistaken for five people, as our bandname suggests, but actually it stands for something else, namely the most busy and cultural district of our city. The music itself sounds and feels like a free fall maybe..
2. Please give us an update about – new single, new album, tour dates, new videos?!
Yes! We have three new singles out right now from our forthcoming album ‘Burnt Sugar’; the whole thing will be out by the end of this March on A Tree In A Field Records, so we’re really excited about that and people can pre-order the vinyls with the posters by our friends Offshore Studio already. And then we have a release tour in Switzerland and Germany coming up this April promoting the album – we really can’t wait to play live again, we love it!
3. Name 5 things we all should know about you as a band?!
Ok. so first of all we’re really good friends. Our favorite car for various reasons is the Renault Espace, and we’re always hyper productive, there will be more releases soon and we plan to continuously release music starting from this year. We’ll keep u updated on the socials, where we share everything we do together. Even if there wouldn’t be an audience to our music, we’d still play – but as we said before, we’re super lucky to play again! In front of real people, not only cameras, and it’s the best thing! We’ve all lived together at one time too, so that’s maybe something that not many people know about us.
4. What fashion style or brand would best describe your music?
It feels like there are really interesting things happening in fashion right now, new people doing some really exciting stuff – the industry moves so fast and is always transforming and pushing forward so it´s hard to pick a favorite. Personally I loved seeing Mugler and Virgil´s output during the pandemic..in Zurich, the city we live in, there’s a huge culture of young, cool people spending all their hard earned money to look good clothing-wise. So you kind of have to not fall off too much, but at the same time it’s also super fun and games.
5. What’s your songwriting process?
We compose all the songs together; lyrics are generally written by the person singing them. We jam a lot together or someone comes up with an idea and we start building around it. Everyone writes his own part basically. Since we usually work on several songs at the same time, we record parts or ideas and then relearn the songs in the next rehearsal. Nothing is really written down.
6. If you could change anything about the industry, what would it be?
That’s a great question..streaming has messed up a lot of things, financially, and is really just a continuation of the exploitation of artists. We really need to bring forward a new kind of economy that benefits everyone and not just a couple of players – why not start there for example?
7. Tell us more about your songs! Topics! Message!?
There are no rules again, Tapiwa and Vojko are writing most of the Lyrics and they do have different styles of writing. So if you listen to the album, coming out end of March, you’ll be able to find that out yourself as well. But as a whole you could say, we don’t like to be too clear, we want to give the listener space to get to their own interpretation. And we do like words that sound good, have a rhythm to them and so on, also one of the reasons why we do sing in English. This and to be universally understood.
8. A question you’d like to answer, but never been asked in an interview before?!
Do you like jazzzz? Yeah we do, when it’s not academic, when it’s from the soul you know. We like things, where the players, the people are free to express themselves, not caged in what they’re supposed to do, in music and elsewhere.
Instagram: @districtfive.band
06.04.22 Bee-Flat im Progr – Bern
07.04.22 Klangvorhang Heilbronn
08.04.22 Dieselstrasse – Esslingen
10.04.22 Franz Ulrich – Kassel
11.04.22 Milla – München
12.04.22 Urban Spree – Berlin
13.04.22 bogen f – Zürich
01.05.22 Kaserne Jazz Festival – Basel
14.05.22 Jazz Festival – Schaffhausen